http://www.sauria.com/blog Open Source, Modern Programming Languages, OS X, Photography, and ... Fri, 16 May 2008 18:57:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Learning to lighting has done a lot for my photography. It's not just gaining a new appreciation for light of all kinds, but also the fact that lit photographs have cause me to think about photographs differently. I used to be a much more reactive photographer - I would just ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/05/16/book-review-the-photographers-eye/ I stayed around in San Francisco for one more day after JavaOne, in order to attend the Scala liftoff. The liftoff was an open space style conference (which has a more specific meaning than "unconference", at least to me). My friend Kaliya Hamlin did a great job of facilitating the ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/05/14/scala-liftoff/ I've been to so many conferences and seen so many talks that it's hard for me to really get excited about conference presentations. I went to talks here and there, but nothing at JavaOne was really reaching out at grabbing me (in fairness, this happens at other conferences also, so ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/05/13/javaone-2008-part-2/ JavaOne is a pretty intense experience, simply by virtue of the size. If CommunityOne was twice the size of OSCON, then JavaOne is three times the size of OSCON, and it shows . There was an immediate change in feel and atmosphere once JavaOne got into full swing. You could ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/05/13/javaone-2008-part-1/ Live or semi liveblogging conferences has been getting more and more difficult for me to do. The combination of meetings, networking/parties, and photographs means that it takes longer to assemble the requisite material. Here's a bit on CommunityOne, which took place on Monday. Many people (mostly Sun folks) have been asking ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/05/07/communityone/ I'll be in San Francisco for CommunityOne and JavaOne. My schedule is fairly full for CommunityOne, but I am only on the hook for one official program thing during JavaOne. I'll be around till the end of the Scala liftoff unconference on Saturday the 10th. The last time I attended JavaOne ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/05/02/next-stop-communityonejavaone/ Around this time last year, Adobe open sourced its Flex framework for rich internet applications. Today Adobe announced the Open Screen project, which encompasses a number of things, probably most importantly, the removal of the license restrictions on the SWF file format used by Flash. The other aspects of the ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/05/01/the-open-screen-project/ At the beginning of the month I got my work laptop, one of the early 2008 MacBook Pro's. It came wit h 10.5.2 preinstalled, so I took the opportunity to upgrade to Leopard. It's been an interesting experience sitting on the sidelines watching everyone else explore the new features, but ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/04/30/finally-upgraded-to-leopard/ Jay Nelson, in the comments to Damien Katz's Lisp as Blub: The two relevant issues are system granularity and garbage collector behavior (if it is related to memory and garbage collection). Erlang encourages an architecture of many small-granularity processes. To the extent that this approach is followed, failures ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/04/29/erlang-cgi/ This year at OSCON, I'll be giving a talk called Open Source Community Antipatterns, which is all about the many ways to mess up an open source community. http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/04/24/speaking-at-oscon-2008/ CommunityOne is a free and open developer conference that is run by Sun on the day before JavaOne. This year, there will a space at CommunityOne dedicated to the Python community, complete with whiteboards and wifi. If you are in the Bay Area for JavaOne, or in the Bay Area, ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/04/21/python-at-communityone/ Last weekend the girls participated in the Washington State Science and Engineering Fair. I participated in science fairs from sixth through twelfth grade, so it was a familiar experience to me, at least in some ways. The basic premise is the same, which is that kids learn about the scientific ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/04/11/on-science-fairs/ A good way to learn something is to to hear multiple people give their views. Recently both David Hobby (the Strobist) and Zack Arias (Mr. OneLight) have written posts on the use of umbrellas with off camera lights. http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/04/10/the-big-guys-on-umbrellas/ Long time readers will know that my girls embarked on a series of videos starring their guinea pig, Chatterboy. Julie facilitated this by getting the girls a blog for Guinea Pig TV. For a variety of reasons, Guinea Pig TV has been on hiatus, until a few days ago when ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/04/10/return-of-guinea-pig-tv/ Wondering who's getting jobs working in a dynamic language? Wondering which language? Here are two takes on that question, one from SimplyHired, and one from Prescient. Clear as mud. http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/04/10/dynamic-language-jobs/ A little more than a year ago, I gave myself a birthday present and took Zack Arias' OneLight workshop when it was here in Seattle. I had been reading David Hobby's Strobist blog for some time, but there was something about the time that I spent at the OneLight that ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/03/28/zack-arias-has-a-new-blog/ Bruce Eckel was unhappy about some things that happened at PyCon and wrote about them. A lot of his concerns are relevant to conferences in general, so I decided to break this into another post. The PyCon one was getting long. The crux of his dissatisfaction was that he felt ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/03/20/on-conferences/ It's been 2 years since I've been to PyCon, and things have definitely changed. The last time I went to PyCon (2006 in Dallas), it was still a relatively small conference (3-400), if I remember what I was told), with a familiar feel, especially if you had attended in previous ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/03/20/pycon-2008/ For those of you at PyCon, Frank Wierzbicki and I will be hosting an open space session on Saturday (tomorrow) at 2pm for people to come and tell us what they think Sun should do in the Python space. We are definitely interested in input and feedback from the ... http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/03/14/pycon-open-space-with-sun-folks/ David Goodger asked if I would take some photographs for the conference while I was at PyCon, to which I happily agreed. So fair warning that if you come near my camera, you may end up in my Flickr stream. Update: PyCon pictures will be tagged "pycon2008" http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/03/13/watch-out-for-my-camera-at-python/